Tuesday, April 16, 2013

osx protips: folder color breadcrumbs and fun with terminal prompts

I like OSX's "column" view in Finder, showing a few levels of folder structure at once. Lately I've taken to right clicking and using the colored Labels to use as a bread crumb trail for the files I navigate to most (e.g. the projects I've been working on lately in my company's svn repository) It's so much faster to only have 2 or 3 highlighted folders to glance at than to skim the whole list and try to remember which one I wanted.

In my previous post I mentioned changing the Terminal prompt (the only information I tend to need to know is the current directory, and I prefer to see the whole path) If you want, you can even Change Part of the Terminal Prompt into a Cheeseburger, or any other Emoji keyboard. What that post fails to mention is how to enter those special characters -- most OSX apps have a "Edit | Special Characters" menu option (with a keyboard shortcut) and your looking for "emoji". I added a little rocketship to mine:

I had to pad with spaces, the character is wider than a normal alphanumeric.

(Incidentally, iPhones and iPads have this keyboard too... go to Settings | General | Keyboard | Keyboards | Add New Keyboard and then the popup keyboard will have a little globe icon to switch to the emoji... if you use it in texts you should make sure the recipient has an iPhone (or other smartphone? Not sure) or else the characters might not come out right.)